How is application security defined?

Application security means a series of security measures and practices that protect a company's applications against theft or misappropriation of the information and code contained therein. Application security also includes security that installs at the time of application development. More specifically, application security encompasses the software, mechanisms and equipment that make it possible to identify and reduce the vulnerabilities that the security in place may suffer from.

You should also know that the various application security practices are generally integrated into the software like a firewall. The latter is programmed in such way as to identify the authorized operations from those which are not. In addition, security measures can incorporate routine security activities allowing the introduction of protocols such as the development of tests on a regular basis.

What are the challenges of application security?

Today, all companies face major challenges that are struggling issues of application security. However, the element of application security is at times neglected in the sense that companies apply themselves to securing their network, their servers or even their entire infrastructure but somehow neglect application security. Indeed, companies carry out little or no code auditing and security of their applications. Very often this maneuver is explained by reasons related to the operation of automated audits which are limited to the detection of faults at the software level and which are already notorious. Also, it is a question of intrusion audits which include both the infrastructure and the network in addition to the difficulty and the length of the audit of characteristic developments which cannot be done automatically.

What are the types of application security?

Application security comes in different types which are: security testing, authentication, logging, encryption as well as authorization. In addition, it is possible to code the applications in order to best limit the vulnerability of their security. Indeed, an application or software developermay include authentication and authorization measures at an application level to ensure access to only users. This system makes it possible to identify and authenticate the user through a request to enter a user name and a related password when he connects to the application. Following this, the system performs a verification as to the ability of the user to access the application while establishing an identification thereof from a list comprising all the authorized users.

Before access authorization is granted by the system, the user must therefore be authenticated. This operation allows the application to perform a comparison of the user authentication information that has been validated with the information in the list containing the authorized users. Of course, application security practices are not limited to these operations, it continues once authentication and authorization have been performed and extends to security against possible hacking . The latter is manifested through the display of confidential data or even the use of them.

How to audit your application security?

It is a question of carrying out an audit of the code of the application concerned in order to identify possible faults at the level of this one. The sources from which these faults can come are numerous. These may be operating bugs, insecure source code, access control, SQL injections or poorly integrated protocols. Thus, establishing an analysis and an audit of the various flaws relating to the development of an application is not as easy and must take into account two major elements, namely: the detection of flaws and their corrective measures as well as the training of developers and their knowledge of application security issues.

What are the application security threats?

There are basically two significant threats that a company's application security can face. First, it is about the vulnerability that can come from the source code of an application or from the libraries that it can contain. Moreover, many vulnerabilities that affect mobile applications by exposing them to threats and attacks that can mainly lead to theft of sensitive data. Then there is the threat of unexpected behavior. Indeed, an application contains libraries that can cause it to perform superfluous operations. Also, these actions can be made due to development negligence that may occur between the testing stages and the actual implementation. In either case, all of these unexpected behaviors can lead to a situation of exfiltration of sensitive user data.

Performing the application security assessment is not an easy task. Nowadays, frameworks and various technologies are constantly developing in addition to increasing the pressure of putting applications into production. As a result, and in this current context, ensuring the non-existence of a defect or a security breach now takes on a difficult aspect, in this case during the production launch stage. This is why a battery of tools, some of which are free to use, as well as practices have been designed and implemented in order to identify any security flaws and weaknesses that may be observed during the development an application security audit.